Popcorn Time Hits 100K Daily Downloads, Should Netflix Be Worried?

Netflix and Hollywood both need to be concerned about Popcorn Time. A developer related to the video pirate service allows that the company’s application has reached 100,000 downloads per day, according to Wired.

Netflix aware of the threat

With 57.4 million users across the world, Netflix is still way ahead of Popcorn Time. However, Popcorn Time comes close to Netflix considering the streaming service “signed up an average 138,000 users per day in the fourth quarter of 2014,” says a report from VentureBeat.

Netflix is already aware of the threat Popcorn Time. Earlier this year, Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings acknowledged that Popcorn Time was a long-term threat. Now, with the growing popularity of the software, the threat seems to be more apparent.

The anonymous developers behind the software released it as an open-source project. The project was halted by the authorities, but was resurrected by some other groups of developers. On the grounds that no copy of the content is placed on the users’ personal computers, the creators of Popcorn Time advocated that the service is completely legal, but as expected Hollywood had a different opinion.

Popcorn Time better than Netflix?

The Popcorn Time application is used to creating an interface that is very similar to Netflix for torrents of videos. With typical torrent applications, the users had to first download entire torrent videos before they could watch them, which led to taking up most of the free space on their hard disk drives. Such downloads could also take time depending on the number of peers sharing the video as well as the user’s broadband speed.

However, it is just a matter of few clicks for the user to start streaming a movie with the easy to use graphical interface provided by Popcorn Time. Popcorn Time offers subscribers an unlimited collection of movies and TV shows to choose from, giving it an edge over Netflix, whose subscribers can only access content which Netflix is able to gain rights to by striking deals with the Hollywood studios, says the VentureBeat report.